and soul, and has remained an evergreen-a steady earner. It became a foundational track in the quiet storm of seventies R. & B. 1, was one of the biggest hits of the year.

Gaye, in addition to his soaring vocal, played keyboard on the record. Gaye recorded the song in L.A., in March, 1973, with members of the Funk Brothers, Motown’s house band, who added the wah-wah guitar introduction and the song’s undeniable groove, in which the second and fourth chords are anticipated-slightly in front of the beat.

Gaye and Townsend agreed to split their share of the composition’s future earnings. Motown’s music-publishing company, Jobete, took fifty per cent of the song’s copyright. Together, they created “Let’s Get It On.” Gaye, who was suffering from writer’s block after the huge success of “What’s Going On,” for Motown Records, in 1971, heard his friend’s song as a hymn to sex. “I’ve been really tryin’ baby, tryin’ to hold back this feeling for so long” was one of the lines.

Townsend, then forty-three, had recently been released from rehab, and the song was a plea to a higher power to help him stay sober. Sitting at the piano, Townsend played a four-chord progression in the key of E-flat major while singing a melody that harked back to his doo-wop days. superstar Marvin Gaye, to his home in Los Angeles, to hear some new tunes. One day in 1973, Edward Townsend, a singer-songwriter who’d had a minor hit with the 1958 ballad “For Your Love,” invited a friend, the R. & B.

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